Bestselling author and former professor Huston Smith offers a fascinating tour of the world's major religions–Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam–in conversations with journalist Bill Moyers. The world-traveling Smith claims that at core, all religions are the same–and that at their best, they provide universal truths by which humans can define and unite themselves.

In this lesson, world-acclaimed artist Steve Huston tackles one of art's most complex and elusive subjects: the human figure. In order to draw, paint, or sculpt the figure, you need to know what it looks like. Steve gives you an essential crash course of the structure, proportion, and gender variations of the figure. You will learn how to simplify and construct the figure from simple characteristic shapes and forms for more direct, readable, and powerful figurative art.

Midway through his lush new memoir, the religious scholar Huston Smith pauses to rattle off a list of fond remembrances: dancing among the whirling dervishes in Iran, camping with the Aborigines in Australia, sharing a chuckle with a gaggle of Masai warriors on the darkening Serengeti plains. Each anecdote is offered up with minimum explication and just a few choice adjectives, as if Smith's sense of marvel at the strange bounty of the world should suffice. And in most cases, it does. "Tales of Wonder," co-written with Jeffery Paine, opens in the medieval town of Soochow, China, where Smith's parents served as missionaries, and ends, some 200 pages later, with a quote from Saint John Chrysostom: "Praise for everything. Praise for it all!" In between, Smith meets with some of the 20th century's major luminaries – Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, Martin Luther King, Jr. – and sets out to carve his own name on the face of history. When he was just shy of 40, Smith published his opus, "The World's Religions," a now classic study of comparative theology. Its popularity opened the door to a series of professorial posts and several trips around the globe, each one more spectacular than the last. "For me," confides Smith, now nearly 90, "any real reason to travel, even a bad one, was a good reason to pack my bags and set off. If a place was on the map, and especially if it wasn't, I wanted to go and learn what could be learned only there."

Jimmy Smith wasn't the first organ player in jazz, but no one had a greater influence with the instrument than he did; Smith coaxed a rich, grooving tone from the Hammond B-3, and his sound and style made him a top instrumentalist in the 1950s and '60s, while a number of rock and R&B keyboardists would learn valuable lessons from Smith's example.